
CRITICAL: NNMHR Congress 2023
Online conference | April 19-21, 2023
Registration is now open for the 2023 Congress of the Northern Network for Medical Humanities (NNMHR), a three-day online conference which promises to be an essential calendar event for medical humanities research.
Our theme is CRITICAL, and this is the fifth Congress of the NNMHR, jointly hosted by NNMHR and the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. The previous Congress, held online in 2021, was attended by over 1,300 delegates, from Europe, the Americas, South Africa, the Middle East, and Australasia.
Why CRITICAL? The conference marks a decade since conversations at a symposium held in 2013 first began to articulate a ‘critical turn’ for medical humanities, a turn which continues to redefine the field to this day. Reframing the critical as ‘entangled’ rather than oppositional, and emphasising the benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration, methodological experimentation, creative risk-taking, and reflective practice, ‘critical’ medical humanities was proposed as a way of moving beyond a servile or antagonistic relation to medicine and practices of healthcare (Viney et al 2015).
NNMHR Congress 2023 invites researchers and practitioners from across the globe to gather once more under the sign of the CRITICAL in order to assess the role of health research today and consider the futures of humanities/social science research in relation to healthcare and medicine. Together, we want to explore the extent to which the early promises of critical medical humanities were adequate, whether they have or have not been fulfilled, where the field is at now, and where it might be going.
Responses to our call for submissions earlier this year were stunning in their range, quality, and exhibition of new trends in the medical humanities. The papers and workshops of NNMHR Congress 2023 comprise an incisive yet methodologically diverse range of interventions, with over 40 panels and 150 speakers articulating a critical medical humanities which has moved into ever more politically ambitious spaces in ways that demonstrate clear lines of flight from the mid 2010s and before.
Panels include:
- Arts-Based and Creative Research Methods in Uncertain Times
- Can Public Engagement Find Criticality in the Wilds of the Inter?
- Decoloniality and the Critical Medical Humanities
- Disability Justice
- Neurodivergent Humanities
- New Approaches in Illness Narrative
- Non-Human Animals in the Medical Humanities
- Of Ultimate Concern: Spiritual Tools and Technologies for Critical Medical Humanities
Other elements of CRITICAL to look forward to:
- Keynote speakers (to be announced soon)
- Keynote panel discussions bringing together leading figures of critical medical humanities, global health research, and disability studies.
- Keynote plenary discussion between leading figures associated with the “critical turn” of medical humanities.
- Lightning talks
- Advice sessions with university and trade publishers
- Special panel led by editors of The Polyphony, an online academic platform publishing the most exciting new work in the medical and health humanities
- Opportunities to network with a dynamic global cohort of speakers and delegates
The conference is fully online to increase the capacity of researchers and practitioners from around the world to attend. We are using the online platform Whova to create spaces for engagement between all speakers and conference participants. Once you register you will have access to this platform right away, giving you an opportunity to connect and build communities with peers.
The NNMHR Congress is free to attend. We welcome attendees from everywhere, not just with those who identify as medical humanities researchers and not just those working within formal structures of the university. Join up for free through Whova, whether you’d like to attend a single session or immerse yourself in the full three-day programme.
In order to register, please click the button below:
Register now for CRITICALFollow the latest Congress news on Twitter using our hashtag #nnmhr2023
